I watched the How To Train Your Dragon 2 and really liked it. Toothless from HTTYD and Remy from Ratatouille are two characters that I wish I can adopt for real.
One of my personal interests is to study styles. I love Chris Sanders’ design when it comes to feline like character and when I was doodling on my computer, I decided to make Toothless in Chris Sanders design (I mean, he is the creator but no dragon toys are manufactured in his style as far as I’m aware of). It was nice to spread books and references on my kitchen table and sketched out key elements for appeal in his style. I think I know a thing or two about character appeal… Modeling went fast BUT the 3d printing was a whole new journey.
Dragon turned out to be a great printing exercise how to structure support system with lot of overhangs such as wings, tail and hunched over head from lizard like posture and my goal was printing a model without breaking up into pieces . Also the orientation of the model was very important to minimize surface touching to the build plate and overhangs. Always remember to orient the model for natural build up direction. I actually enjoyed support building and object orientation puzzle.
All prints were done low to med res for quick turn arounds (because there were lot of failures… lots…)
MeshMixer has pretty cool brach like support builder with rod diameter, base layer controls and custom branch building UI.
